Learning to Human
by Laziness Incarnate
Summary: Valentine and Ender, on the colony ship. An immediate sequel to Ender's Game. Directly contradicts Ender in Exile. Written for tabacoychanel for Yuletide 2018.


**Learning to Human**

"So today I learned why your underwear sometimes has blood on it."

Ender was seated on his bed with his desk propped up on his knees. He never bothered to say hello when Valentine came back to their room, too engrossed in his "research" for social niceties. Usually she didn't let it bother her but now she felt heat crawl up her neck. "You didn't know about menstrual cycles?"

"Apparently a lot of people don't." He tilted the desk toward her and pointed at the text on the screen. "See, even the girl in this novel is really surprised when she first starts to bleed. 'Lyn-Anne stared and stared at the red blotches on her panties. Was something wrong with her? Was she dying? Her heart beat wildly, a thunderous pounding in her chest.'" Ender paused. "I suppose that would be scary, seeing your own blood like that."

"Girls see their own blood all the time. You boys are so weak and you don't even know it."

"Yeah," said Ender. "We just spill other people's blood. Much easier."

"Yeah, it's usually the Y-chromosomers who shoot first."

"I think it has to do with ejaculation fantasies or something."

Valentine moved to pluck the desk out of his hands, but he was too fast for her. Stupid Battle School training. "What _are_ you reading?"

"It's written by a female, for females, so you can blame your own people for corrupting my young mind."

"You're about as corrupt as a diaper. Filthy but still baby-level."

"I'm working my way up."

"I'm going to turn on the censoring options on your desk. You're still twelve, I can do that."

"I'll just read yours instead. I'm sure it's filled with trash."

It was filled with political treatises and historical research, but yeah, a lot of it was sordid in its own way. She'd given up on Demosthenes but Demosthenes wouldn't give up on her. "You know, instead of reading about girls you could go talk to some. Like me for instance."

"I've talked to lots of girls before."

"Butch Battle School babes don't count."

Ender smiled faintly. "Butch is right."

Briefly she wondered if the girls in Battle School really slept in the barracks with the boys, the way he said they did. A weird twisty feeling coiled in her gut at the thought of those army girls changing into nightclothes alongside her baby brother, sleeping in the bed next to his, maybe climbing in beside him to giggle into his ear the way she used to. What were the teachers at that school thinking? "So I guess you know all about girls then, huh?"

Ender had stopped staring at his desk and was staring at her face instead. She wondered how much he could guess at her thoughts. Stupid Battle School training.

"I don't know anything about real people," he said after a moment, then turned back to his desk. "Which is why I need to read."

"Why don't you come out of this stuffy room and read outside?"

"'Outside' is the same recycled air as in here."

"But outside this room there are other people."

"And inside this room I don't need to see them."

It was a dismissal. Valentine bit back her retort and counted silently to ten. This was nothing. She had lived with Peter all her life and he was a much bigger asshole than Ender by far. For Peter, assholing was like eating or breathing. For Ender, it was like...something drilled into him, rigorously and thoroughly.

Stupid Battle School training.

"I'm going back out," said Val, "to get some air."

Ender didn't look up from his desk as she left.

-0-0-0-0-0-

Valentine stalked the hallways, thinking.

Ender didn't want to be governor of the colony. It was obvious to her, obvious to everyone on the ship. Even if they were too nice to say anything, she could see it in the looks they threw at him in the mess halls, outside the toilets and showers, the only public places Ender frequented. They all knew who he was from the vids: Ender the saviour of humanity, Ender the saint, Ender the boy who murdered other boys but only for good reason. They didn't know him but they worshipped him all the same.

Yet so far no one had breathed a word to him beyond a polite greeting.

Valentine knew why of course. She had it from Graff that he'd seeded their ship with, to quote, "as nice and unobtrusive a group of weirdos as we could find, considering that you basically have to be insane to leave Earth forever and colonize a hostile planet."

So far everything he'd promised her was true. No one bothered her and Ender. The two of them were free to be reclusive little misfits.

At first that had suited her fine. Val liked her privacy. She liked not having to field stupid questions about her famous brother. For the first few weeks she had been so _thankful_ to be left alone. She'd wanted desperately to spend time with him, to learn who he'd become, to fill up all those aching holes his leaving had scooped out of her. But after three months of rooming with...with this self-contained, self-absorbed man-child, she was desperate as hell to get him out of his cave.

Val could feel the warmth creeping up her neck again, this time in anger. Anger at herself or at Ender, she didn't know. She shouldn't think of her brother so meanly. He'd been traumatized by his time in the military, in the war, PTSD'ed for sure. If there was anyone she should be angry at it was Graff. Graff, who'd said to her with solemn, heavy eyes that he was sorry for all he'd done but also not sorry because they'd won. And in the end that must have been what Ender wanted too, what Valentine must have wanted when she sat with her brother on a raft in the quiet beauty of that earthly place and told him to go kill an entire species because it was his job, it was what he was born for, so stop whining and do it.

And so he'd done it. And now here they were.

Valentine's footsteps had taken her to the ship psychologist's office. She stared at the plastic door. There was a piece of paper stuck to the door showing words of welcome. The tone of the message was friendly, the font big and bubbly. She should go in.

But now she wasn't so sure whose sake she'd come for-Ender's or her own.

After staring at the door for a good thirty seconds, Val turned away. This wasn't about pride, she told herself. Pride had never stopped her from hurting or helping Ender before. Pride hadn't stopped her from becoming Demosthenes. She wasn't a proud person. She just knew her brother too well to send him to an adult for fixing.

-0-0-0-0-0-

"No, don't," Ender muttered.

The room was dark so she couldn't see his face, but she knew how he looked. Cold sweat running down his temples, hair pasted against his skull, mouth stretched back in a grimace.

"Andrew," she whispered. "Wake up. You're dreaming."

He kept muttering, unintelligible little breaths of pain mixed with names of people she didn't know. She knew better than to go to him. She'd gotten a bruise on her cheek from another night like this. She still remembered the way he'd looked when his eyes opened: pupils dilated with fight or flight, fists raised in a martial stance, a look of horror flashing across his face as he realized what he'd done.

"Valentine," he cried out in the present.

Val threw a pillow at his face.

Predictably, the pillow didn't enjoy the experience.

After the sounds of the beating and histrionics both died down, Val said the word to turn on the lights.

Ender was sitting up in his bed ramrod straight. He was breathing hard and his face was splotchy. Val wanted badly to go over there and wrap him in her arms, but she'd tried that once too, and it hadn't ended with a bruise on her face but the result had been just as bad.

"What did you dream up this time?"

Ender shook his head like he always did.

"I can wait all night," Valentine said. "I won't be able to fall back asleep and I have nothing better to do."

He shook his head again.

"Why not?"

"It wasn't…" His face contorted. "I can't describe it."

"You said my name."

"I did?"

Valentine searched his face for any hint of a lie. She couldn't find it, but that didn't mean much. "You know that when humans talk about things they usually feel better afterward, right?"

"Have you ever kissed a snake, Val?"

She tried not to show her surprise. "Not that I know of. You planning a midnight prank?"

"It felt like that. Like kissing a snake."

"What did? Your dream?"

He wiped a hand across his sweaty brow. "When I agreed to go on this voyage, I told you why I was going."

"I remember." She kept her eyes steady on his face. "You said it wasn't for me or any of the other colonists. It was for the buggers."

"Yeah."

"Did you dream about the buggers?"

"No. I used to."

Valentine wished he would just give her a straight answer. "If you didn't dream about them, why did you mention them?"

Ender slid back down onto his bed, laid his head on his pillow. He stared at the ceiling. "I thought I was ready to fly to one of their worlds."

"You have two years to get ready."

"Two years to become governor of a colony."

"You'll be a whopping fourteen years old by then."

He was shivering. His sweat was probably nicely chilled now. "I thought I was ready to do it again. But I'm not."

Duh, thought Val. Becoming ready is a process, and that process starts with stepping outside this room. But she didn't say that. "That's why it's like kissing a snake?"

Ender closed his eyes and didn't speak for a long time. He wasn't asleep though. Valentine waited. "I don't think the buggers are all gone," he finally said. "I don't know why I think it. But I'm going to build a colony on top of their dead world. That's my job."

Now it was Val's turn to shiver. So this was the crux of the matter then-not fear of leadership, but fear of where his leadership would take him. Not fear of failure, but fear of success.

Valentine had her own fears. This wasn't the first time he'd alluded to his strange connection with the buggers. She'd thought that was all past tense. If he was right about them not being quite dead...well, the human race didn't need another war.

"I can see why you have nightmares."

Ender let out the breath he'd been holding. "You believe me."

"Yes. God help us all but I do."

"How do you know I'm not going crazy?"

"If I thought you were going crazy," said Valentine, "I would have stopped by the psych office today and made you an appointment."

"You don't always have to baby me back to sleep you know."

"But how else would I accumulate blackmail material to use against you?"

A smile flicked across his face, silver quick. "Now there's the real nightmare."

Val felt the hope and fear coiling inside her chest, snakelike, an ouroboros of useless sentiment. History told her it was wrong, it was a risk, but she stretched one hand across the gap between their beds to twine her fingers with his. "Life is the nightmare, Ender Wiggin. It sucks and it is terrible. But I'm here to share it with you, forever and ever, no matter how much you want to get rid of me. Worse than a bugger dream I'll haunt you always, dear little brother."

After a moment he squeezed her fingers back. "Okay," he said. "It's a promise."

-0-0-0-0-0-

But the next day, Ender still wouldn't come out of the room.

"I did leave," he said, arguing like a child. Like his actual age. "I ate and I peed. After I digest my breakfast, I'll do more than that if you get what I mean."

"You need to talk to some human beings," said Val. "You are starting to become a Neanderthal."

"Are you saying you're not human?"

"I'm your sister. That's the exact opposite of a human being."

Ender opened up his desk. "On Eros, people threw themselves at me so they could worship the ground I walked on. Sometimes literally."

"That must have been fun."

"For some reason they are not doing that here, probably because Mazer Rackham is the captain of this ship and Minister Graff made each person sign a binding contract before they could step onto this ship."

"I think there might be some of that going on," Val admitted.

"But they're still watching me."

"They're waiting for you."

Ender had pulled up a text on his desk and was scrolling through it. "I've been under constant surveillance since before I could walk. Forgive me if I want a vacation from it."

Val put her hand on his desk so she could tug it away. This time he didn't try to evade her. "There's no monitor on your neck anymore. There's no classes, no game, no battles."

"There are worse things."

"Like what?"

"Eyes on me. Expectations."

"Welcome to the human race, Ender."

"I hate whenever you say that," he said, voice resigned.

Val threw his desk onto her own bed, far away from where he was sitting. "Let's go, little brother. It's time you learn to human."

-0-0-0-0-0-

She dragged him off to the exercise rooms, because if there was something Ender needed other than human interaction, it was to move more.

"I do a high intensity workout in the room when you're not around," Ender said mildly. "I probably get more exercise than you."

But he didn't resist when she gently guided him, one hand on his back, past the bikes and weights room, onward to the zero gravity chamber.

"I need to show you something," said Val.

"I know how to maneuver in zero grav better than you ever will."

"Trust me, you need to see this."

"I've seen it before," said Ender as he stepped through the gate. "People just bounce around in here. It's not exercise-"

And then he saw them. Across the room, a group of adults and teenagers and kids floating in jumpsuits of orange and grey, their faces obscured by hard rounded helmets. In their hands were bright plastic guns. They laughed as they fired at each other, freezing arms or legs or heads or whole bodies sometimes, until someone pressed a button on a device and all the frozen people unfroze. Then they could move and laugh together again.

Ender gripped the handholds on the wall hard enough to turn his knuckles white. He didn't say anything.

Val stepped through the gate and awkwardly maneuvered so she could clutch the wall beside him. She felt a little ill, even though this wasn't her first time in this room. "Captain Rackham put that equipment out a few days ago. He said the Minister of Colonization provided it. Apparently the IF doesn't need it anymore."

"No one needs it. The whole reason I fought that war was so that we could...stop doing this."

"Just because the buggers are gone doesn't mean the planet we're taking from them is safe. There'll be hostile fauna and flora and who knows what else. And like you said, the buggers might not be gone forever."

He didn't react, but she could see from the look in his eyes that he understood. We'll always have to fight, little brother. Even if there are no other aliens in the universe who want to kill us, we still have to fight to survive. We may be leaving Peter behind but that doesn't mean we leave ourselves behind.

"You think Mazer and Graff did this to annoy me?" said Ender.

"I think they did it because they care about you."

"They have a weird way of showing it."

She took a deep breath. He was thinking too much and so was she. They both needed to move.

Val kicked off hard but her foot slipped against the padded wall. Rather than launching herself across the room, proud and strong, she drifted feebly into empty space, stranded from walls and handholds and humans.

Oh well. Val splayed her limbs and let herself drift, breathing in and out through her nose. She turned her head so she could see her brother. "Come on, float like an idiot with me. Like a root beer float."

"I don't know what that is." But Ender let go of his handhold and kicked himself lightly off the wall. He came to her side with a sense of calm surety that made her purse her lips a little. He was probably laughing at her incompetence but she didn't care.

As he came close she held out one hand to him, like she'd done last night. It was a much more wobbly hand this time. "Help me make less of an embarrassment of myself."

"You look so silly with your hair floating everywhere like that," said Ender, grabbing her hand. She felt her momentum shift as his weight latched onto hers. Then he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. "You look beautiful."

Val felt heat crawl up her neck. "I've always wanted to fly you know. Sometimes I've dreamt about being a bird, or a superheroine with a cape and everything."

"You're terrible at flying."

"Then teach me."

And when his eyes locked onto her, those heavy killer's eyes, Val remembered why she hadn't been chosen for Battle School-not butch enough, not driven enough, couldn't even stay angry long enough to want to beat someone-but she also remembered that she had plenty of Peter in her, enough at least to _be_ Demosthenes and not just wear his mask. And she knew, she _knew_ that even if Ender had Peter in him too, enough to scare him silly at the thought of being a leader again, he was also a lot like her, someone who would rather float than fight-but who could, and would, fight to the death if it was important enough.

And there was always something important enough.

"One thing you have to remember," said Ender softly.

"Hmm?"

He put his hand on her back, the way she'd done earlier for him, and gently turned her body so that her feet pointed toward the group with the guns at the other end of the room. "The enemy's gate," he said, "is down."

-End-


End file.
